by Hari Kunzru
—Don’t threaten me, you little fuck. I know jiujitsu.
We stood there for some time, pantomiming aggression. Then he adjusted the waistband of his pants and tipped some newspapers off another chair so he could sit down again.
—He got hurt, you say, your friend? Badly?
—He’s in a coma. How does that sound? Does that make you happy?
He shrugged noncommittally. I could have strangled him.
—He had a lot of money in cash and I think he came looking for you. He wanted to buy that Willie Brown record you talked about.
—Thirteen thousand ninety-nine. I only said that so he’d come. I don’t have that record. Who in the world has that record? It’s a unicorn. I needed to talk to him, was all.
—Talk to him? You mean get someone to rob him.
—No.
—Carter came here.
—Not here. He came to the bar. And I tried to warn him what he’d gotten himself into. Look, you’re giving me palpitations, looming over me like that. I’m not in the best of health. Come on, sit down. Drink a cup of tea.
—What was it, then? What had he got himself into?
—Sit down.
He looked so pathetic hunched in his chair, quivering, holding his fists in front of him like tiny baubles. The idea of hurting him seemed absurd. I sat down. As he pottered about, making tea, I stared at the sickly yellow-green light filtering through the curtains, willing it to grow stronger. I wanted the sun to burst through. I wanted to be bathed in daylight. Once again I tried to tell him how it had happened. The guy singing in Washington Square, the guitarist in Tompkins Square. How we sewed the two parts together and made a song. Shakily, he set two china cups and saucers down on a pile of encyclopedia volumes that was serving as an occasional table. Then he sat down on a kitchen chair and took off his glasses, so as to fix me with a straight look.
—Son, you may think that story’s true. You may have persuaded yourself it is, but you didn’t make up Charlie Shaw. Charlie Shaw is real.
—It’s just a name. Carter chose it at random.
—Charlie Shaw chose you, more like.
—You may know some guy called Charlie Shaw. It’s not the same guy. I’m telling you, this is just bullshit. A misunderstanding about a name.
—I stepped away from the collecting scene after what happened to Chester and I don’t want to get back in. It’s not even safe for me to be talking to you, most probably, but I can’t help myself. I’ll be straight with you. Cards on the table. I’m curious. Killed the cat, right? But this thing has been nagging at me for so many years. I only want to know one piece of information. What’s on the other side? Graveyard Blues on the A, so what’s on the flip?
—Will you not get it into your head? There’s no flip. There’s no record. I don’t have any damn record. It’s a .WAV file, if you even know what one of those is. You probably have it compressed as an MP3.
—I don’t have it as anything and I can’t honestly say I know what the hell you’re talking about.
—Just give me your laptop, I’ll show you.
—Laptop?
—Your computer. You have a computer stashed away somewhere in here.
—Does this look like Bell Laboratories? Be a sport. I’m not even asking to hear the damn thing, let alone handle it. I just want to know what’s on the flip. Why is that so hard?
—Because it doesn’t exist.
—What is with you? I know your story. It’s just like mine. I was the sidekick, same as you. Chester was making all the running. At the time you feel you’re just going along, am I right? Going along to get along. Making yourself useful. But Charlie doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t make those kind of fine distinctions. Which one is the alpha dog and so on. So why would he want your friend? That’s the question you ought to be asking. Because it sounds like he got him.
—He was robbed and left for dead in the Bronx. I don’t know why he would go there or what he was doing. He had no connection to anyone in that part of town.
—I certainly didn’t send him out to the Bronx. He came to the bar, showed me a lot of money. I could tell right away the boy was a lost soul. I’m not a bad man. I tried to talk sense into him, but what can you say when someone’s like that? When they’ve got the collecting bug? I’m the same as you. I’m not a powerful person. But I learned my lesson. I don’t mess with any of it anymore. The boy was angry that I didn’t have any records. Wouldn’t listen to a word of what I was trying to tell him, which was get the hell out right now. Same as I tried to tell you, only you wouldn’t listen either. He kept running his mouth, saying he’d pay top dollar, did I know who he was, so much bull crap, I couldn’t follow it all. He even got his cash out on the table. No street smarts. I mean, anybody could have seen it. Anybody could have heard, the way he was rambling on.
—So you’re saying someone overheard him at the bar?
—He told me the same stupid story you did. That he’d made up Charlie Shaw. Wouldn’t listen to a word I said. I told him, Charlie Shaw wants something from you, and it’s something you probably don’t want to give. You’ve crossed the line and now you have to prepare yourself. He just kept on saying catalog numbers. Paramount this, Okeh that.
—I don’t understand.
—That’s not news to anyone, son. It’s clear to even the most casual observer that you and your friend are lost in the dark. If you promise you won’t interrupt, I’ll tell you. And after I tell you I want you to get the hell out of my apartment, because I barely made it away from Chester’s mess all those years ago and I’m taking a risk even speaking the words. You don’t know about Chester Bly. No one does anymore, though at one time he had a reputation. I’ve seen some collectors, but I can tell you he was the smartest and the most single-minded of them all. He would not rest until he had what he wanted in his hands.
THE STORY THE OLD COLLECTOR TOLD ME was so strange that, had I heard it in any other circumstances, I would have dismissed it as a fabrication. And yet it had a force—I would say the force of truth, but that would be too simple. It wasn’t that I believed it or didn’t believe it, more that it seemed to come from a place beyond belief. Something had attached itself to Carter and me, some tendril of the past, and if we did not detach it, we would be drawn back into death and silence.
The story built up inside me like pressure in a lab vessel. I couldn’t contain it. But who could I tell? The only person who would possibly understand was Leonie, and I doubted she would even hear me out. I used a guest pass to get in to Carter’s gym, where I had a shower and ripped open the plastic on a fresh tee shirt and a change of underwear. I combed my hair and made sure my clothes didn’t have any visible stains. Then I took the records out of storage and waited outside her building, standing on the sidewalk with the walnut box at my feet. I hung around for a long time, almost four hours. I was about to give up when she came out, wearing jeans shorts and one of Carter’s shirts. At first she walked straight past me.
—Leonie! Leonie!
She wheeled round, startled. She was in a bad state. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her big dark glasses but her hair was lank and matted and something in her posture suggested lifelessness, defeat.
—I told you to stay away.
She slipped one hand into her pocket, as if she were about to pull something out. For a moment I thought she might mace me. I imagined falling to my knees like a singer, clawing at my eyes. Leonie standing over me, delivering the coup de grâce.
—Please, Leonie. I wanted to make sure you had these. They’re fragile. I didn’t know where to take them.
I pointed out the box.
—I could just leave them with the doorman, if you’d prefer.
—So you brought me Carter’s death music. Thanks.
—I didn’t know where else I should take it. They’re valuable. You should store them properly.
She stared at the box. She didn’t move.
—I don’t want you to think I was goin
g to keep them. I’m not—that kind of person.
—What kind of person? The kind who’d sell information about my brother?
—Please Leonie, I thought he was one of his friends.
—Who?
—The journalist. It was an honest mistake.
—So you’re sorry and I should, what? Forgive you?
—I wasn’t thinking. It was stupid of me. I should have remembered his—your position.
—What do you want, Seth?
—Nothing, I swear. I just don’t want you to think I’m a thief.
—Bullshit. Everyone wants something from us. It’ll save time if you just tell me.
She lit and smoked a cigarette. I stared at the paving stones.
—You probably want me to go.
Weakly, she waved her hand.
—You’re just going to leave that here? I don’t know if I can even handle having that shit in my apartment.
—So where should I take them?
—I don’t know. Break them for all I care.
—Break them?
—No, of course not. Fuck it, I suppose you have to bring them up.
Though the doorman offered to take the box, I carried it to her apartment as carefully as if it were Carter’s own body. To my surprise she asked if I wanted coffee. I think she didn’t mean to; it was the sort of social reflex to which she was ordinarily immune. But she asked, and once I’d said yes, she had to follow through. As she pushed buttons on her machine, I hovered near the riverside window, surveying a scene of minor devastation. Ashtrays improvised out of cups, foil takeout trays and wine bottles on the floor, a deep scar in the brickwork of one wall.
—Did you have a party?
—Milk? I only have soy. I think there’s some agave in the cupboard if you want it sweet.
—No thanks.
She handed me a mug. Seeing that I’d noticed the mess in her apartment, she made a sarcastic face.
—Yes, I had a wild party. Definitely one of the all-time great nights.
I couldn’t tell from her tone whether she meant that she’d held a party which had gone badly, or that she’d made the mess herself. There were mugs and glasses scattered along the windowsills. The gash in the brickwork looked like it had been done with a power tool, maybe an angle grinder.
Then we were sitting down opposite each other on two prototypes of a famous Danish chair, and the silence was building up, the pressure of my untold story climbing higher and higher. The only thing I could think of to say was how sorry I was. Again.
—Sure.
She followed my eyeline to the damaged wall.
—My neighbors really love me.
—What did you do?
—I don’t even know. I was upset.
—That sounds bad.
—Yeah?
—So you know Corny had me kicked out.
—I heard.
Her voice was flat. She didn’t say she was sorry or ask where I was staying. I asked how Carter was doing.
—The same. Exactly the same. They say we shouldn’t get our hopes up. It’s very unlikely anything will change now. Even if he wakes up…
She trailed off. I thought of Carter in a high room over the city, his consciousness scattered under the pressure of blood clots and lesions. I told her I would never be disloyal.
—You mean to my brother?
—And to you. I screwed up, I know it, but in revenge Cornelius has locked me out of the studio. I don’t care about the apartment. All our work is in the studio. Our files, all our equipment. I don’t have any other—we have clients, we’ve signed contracts. You understand, Leonie? My whole life is in that studio.
—Corny’s very angry. He called it a direct frontal attack on the family.
—I didn’t take any money, I swear. The guy called me and I picked up the phone. I just need. How can I put this. If he could let me have my property, that’s all I ask. My intellectual property.
—Maybe if you got a lawyer.
Her family had most of my possessions, all my equipment, my tools. I had a couple hundred dollars in a checking account. How could I afford a lawyer?
—What I’m saying, Seth, is that I really can’t get involved. I can’t get in between you and Corny.
I asked if I could use her bathroom. On the way there I peeped round the half-open door of her bedroom. The bed was a midden of clothes and shoes and other things—Q-tips, an open compact spilling powder. Bits of broken mirror littered the floor. It looked like Leonie was sleeping in the living area. Someone had thrown blankets and pillows onto a couch opposite a big pulldown screen, a little survival zone haloed in trash. I locked the bathroom door and sat on the toilet, wondering what to say when I came out. I examined her toothbrush, the flesh-toned silk robe hanging on a hook on the door. Inside her medicine cabinet were rows of bottles, containing vitamins and esoteric supplements. She had prescriptions from a homeopath, a Chinese herbalist. Capsules of freeze-dried thymus gland extract, “fortified with herb activators and naturopathically prepared nutrients for synergistic effect.” Something called turquoise aromatherapy color energy blend. A cabinet full of charms to ward off death. I tried to imagine how she must feel to herself as she stood naked in that marble-tiled bathroom, swallowing pills. Hearing death come creeping in, slinking round her ankles like a cat.
I took a couple of caps of something called Acetyl-L-Carnitine and scrutinized myself in the mirror. I barely recognized the haggard face I saw, its cheeks hollowed out by anxiety, by fear. I knew that if I didn’t go back out and tell Leonie what JumpJim had told me, then I would break apart, just vibrate until I shattered.
—I am afraid, I said. I am so afraid.
—What are you afraid of?
Of the sound underlying the other sounds, the suffering rising up all around me, the mare’s nest of cable I have to untangle if I am going to find the fault. Of the way the past has hold of Carter. Of my suspicion that it has a name and a face.
Help Carter, I sobbed. I meant help me.
Leonie help me. I am caught in a riptide. Help me, at least. Carter is already beyond our reach.
HOW LONG AGO? That doesn’t matter. Far back in time, drowned in the crackle and hiss. I was nineteen years old, living in a sixth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village and working as a messenger at the New York Herald Tribune, running copy between reporters and editors in the newsroom of their building on 41st Street. Long gone, that newsroom, that paper.
I was a jazz fanatic, but I had no time for the modern stuff. No Miles or Coltrane for me, no bebop, which I called Chinese jazz, because it was all splintered and broken up. I was what they used to term a “hot collector,” obsessed with the music of the twenties. To me that was the real deal, the source and origin. Like every other dumb kid starting out down that particular road, my god was Bix Beiderbecke. I didn’t know a thing. On my lunch breaks I’d hang around at a store in midtown we all knew as Indian Joe’s, digging in the crates. I’d buy any old crap for eight bars of Bix.
One day, doesn’t matter how, I tumbled to the idea that what I loved didn’t come from Davenport, Iowa. As my tastes changed, I started take the subway uptown to Apollo Music at 125th and Lenox, on the hunt for King Oliver or Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. New Orleans became my city, New Orleans and its great founding myth, the sound of the drummers in Congo Square vibrating through young Buddy Bolden’s ears and on into the pulse of America. It was my fantasy to hear Bolden, the one who came before King Oliver and all the other bandleaders, the one who was never recorded, whose sound was the missing link to the past. Buddy Bolden, vanished into the silence. I dreamed of being the one who uncovered, in some dusty basement or thrift store backroom, a cache of wax cylinders, my ears the first in fifty years to receive the gift of Bolden’s cornet, its sweet high tone piercing the veil.
I know that by that time I’d heard some blues—by which I mean country blues, not commercial female nightclub singers backed by jazz bands, your Ma Raineys and Mamie
Smiths and so forth. What I’d heard I hadn’t found too interesting. To me, Lead Belly sounded corny. All that “goddamighty-I-kin-pick-a-bale-o’-cotton” horseshit. You want the truth, he was still in the pen, metaphorically speaking, while Lomax père was leading him round those so-called progressive New York parties. I mean, making him perform in his prison stripes? The poor bastard was still doing time. Point is I didn’t care about the blues. Not many collectors did. We were troubled by its lack of sophistication. You have to remember, a lot of people thought the worst of the Negro in those days. We thought that kind of rough, low-down music only served to confirm color prejudice. A lot of Negroes thought so too, I might add. Church people wouldn’t have it in their houses.
Anyhow, one Saturday I was loitering by the counter at the Apollo and one of the clerks put on a Charley Patton Paramount. Number 12792, “Pony Blues” with “Banty Rooster Blues” on the flip.
You can catch my pony, saddle up my black mare
I’m going to find a rider, baby in the world somewhere
That sound, my God. Like it had come out of the earth. It made my jazz records seem like child’s play, like people fooling around in the antechamber, in the vestibule. I asked to hear it again. They sold it to me for a dollar. That’s how much the Paramounts cost. A dollar apiece, all new. The Victors were fifty cents. I took it home and played it twenty times, trying to decipher Patton’s words, to hear every eccentric phrase he played on his guitar.
Right away I sold every damn Bix and Paul Whiteman I owned. All I wanted was blues, blues. But the sound I craved wasn’t easy to come by. Patton, Son House, Willie McTell, Robert Johnson, Willie Johnson, Skip James, John Hurt…The names were traded by collectors, but no one seemed to know a thing about them. No information, not a scrap. They were like ghosts at the edges of American consciousness. You have to understand, when I say no one knew, I mean no one. You couldn’t just look something up in a book. Things were hidden. Things got lost. Musicians got lost.
I subscribed to record collecting magazines. There was Down Beat and Record Changer. I forget the others. Collectors would run want lists, mostly for jazz. Their contact details were printed on the inside cover. There was one guy with a New York address who only wanted blues, name after name I’d never heard of, recorded on labels I knew little or nothing about. C Bly, 179 Division Ave, Brooklyn 11, NY. Sometimes he wrote letters to the editors, correcting some point or offering additional information. His letters were usually more interesting than the articles they responded to. I wrote to him, at the address given, saying very humbly that I was a young collector and wanted guidance. What should I listen to? What was out there? He wrote back, enclosing a three-page typewritten list. Its title was Chester Bly Worthwhile Blues Records April 195—. I corresponded with him for some months before he mentioned an extraordinary thing: he also worked at the Herald Tribune. Of all the people in that warren of a building, the sports reporters and the city reporters and the compositors and copy takers and the rewrite men and the columnists and the printers and the drivers who loaded the papers into their trucks and drove away, we two were the most alike.
